Conferencing is an important way for a set of individuals who are remote from one another to communicate. Existing conferencing systems connect the conference participants in real time, and play the same audio or video to all participants in real time. These conferencing systems are associated with several disadvantages or problems. First, during a conference, participants may tend to interrupt one another. Such interruptions cause the participants to lose their train of thought, and ideas are lost. In particular, when one participant is interrupted by another, the original participant may be distracted listening to what the interrupter is saying and would likely lose his original thought. Alternatively, if the interrupter waits to speak until the original participant is done, the interrupter may lose his own thought and may never find a moment to contribute it to the conversation. Second, it can be difficult for listeners to effectively understand what the participants are saying when two or more conference participants are trying to speak over one another. When this happens, whichever speaker prevails may be affected by circumstances such as rank of the participants, which would impede the useful flow of the information. Third, conferencing systems may sometimes have poor channel conditions that cause delays, which may increase the frequency of interruptions. Also, someone participating in a conference may be distracted at his location and miss important content. Furthermore, someone who is interested in only a part of the content of the conference has to attend the whole conference to hear or say his part. Techniques are needed to improve existing conferencing services to remedy these problems.